ING CHARLES STREET lies in Westminster. You turn a corner and find yourself in Charles Street as one might turn a corner and find oneself in History. The cheap, the nasty, and the new vanish, and fine old comfortable houses of red brick, with gables and mullioned windows, take you into their keeping; tell you that Queen Anne is not dead; amuse you with pictures of sedan chairs and running footmen, and discharge you at the other end into the twentieth century from whence you came.
Simon Pettigrew lived at No. 12, where his father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather had lived before him—lawyers all of them and so respected, so rooted in the soil of the Courts, as to be less a family of lawyers than a minor English institution. Divorce your mind entirely from all petty matters of litigation in connection with the Pettigrews. Simon, or any of his forbears, would have appeared just as readily in their shirt sleeves in Fleet Street as in county or police court for or against the defendant. They were old family lawyers and they had a fair proportion of the old English families in their keeping—deed boxes stuffed with papers, secrets to make one's hair curl.
To the general public this great and potent firm was almost unknown, yet Pettigrew & Pettigrew had cut off heirs to furnish material for a dozen Braddon novels; had smothered numerous screaming tragedies in high life and buried them at dead of night, and all without a wrinkle on the brow of the placid old firm that drove its curricle through the reigns of the Georges, took snuff in the days of Palmerston, and in the days of Edward Rex still refused to employ the typewriter.
Simon, the last of the firm, unmarried, and without near relation, was at the time of this story turned sixty, a clean-shaven, bright-eyed, old-fashioned type of man, sedate, famed for his cellar, and a member of the —a man you never, never would have imagined to possess such a thing as a past; never would have imagined to have been filled with that semidiabolical, semiangelical joy of life which leads to the follies of youth.
All the same, Simon, between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-two, had raked the town vigorously more than viciously, haunted Evans' supper rooms, fallen madly in love with an actress, enjoyed life as only the young can enjoy life in the gorgeous, dazzling, deceitful country of Youth.
Driving in hansom cabs was then a pleasure; new clothes and outrageous shirts and ties a delight; actresses goddesses! Then, one day his actress turned out an actress and the following night he came out of the Cocoa Tree owing a gambling debt of a thousand pounds that he could not pay. His father paid, on his promising to turn over a new leaf, which he did. But his youth was checked, his brightness eclipsed, and arm in arm with common sense he set out on the long journey that led him at last to the high position of a joyless, loveless, desolate, wealthy solicitor of sixty—respected, very much respected; in fact, less a man than a firm. Yet there still remained to him a legacy of his youth, a very pretty wit of his own, an irresponsible turn of talk when he gave himself away, as at dinner parties.
Mudd was Simon's factotum, butler, and minister of inferior affairs. Mudd was sixty-five and a bit. He had been in the services of the Pettigrew family forty-five years and had grown up, so to say, side by side with Simon. For the last twenty years every morning Mudd had brought up his master's tea, drawn up his blinds, and set out his clothes, seven thousand times or thereabouts, allowing for holidays and illnesses. He was a clean-shaven old man with rounded shoulders and a way that had become blunt with long use. He “sirred” Simon only in the presence of guests and servants, and had an open way of speaking on matters of every-day affairs which verged on the conjugal in its occasional frankness.
This morning, the third of June, Mudd, having drawn up his master's blinds and set out his boots and shaving things, vanished and returned with his clothes, brushed and folded, and a jug of shaving water which he placed on the washstand.
“The arms will be out of this old coat if you go on wearing it much longer,” grumbled Mudd, as he placed the things on a chair. “It's been in wear nearly a year and a half. You're heavy on the left elbow; it's the desk does it.”
“I'll see,” said Simon.